Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
Boxes and Arrows: Taking the “you” out of user: My experience using personas.
Thoughtful piece about using personas to ensure that the end-user of the system is accurately designed, rather than some cheerleader or devils advocate of any particular piece of functionality currently being discussed.
Boxes and Arrows: ASIST IA summit. Great collection of summaries of sessions and links to presntations, poster sessions, etc.
Plastic: New Pay-For-Play Music Subscription Services Reviewed. Conclusion: they sort of suck.
The Gentry, Misjudged as Neighbors.
This seems relatively obvious: gentrification doesn’t drive out poorer residents as a) the area is getting nicer and b) the longer they stay, the more the supply/demand differential rises and therefore the more they get when they move. This works for owners; for renters, you might expect to see a faster turnover as landlords increase rents to market levels. I don’t think you can do this in a crazy way though. Either way the process takes c. 10 years rather than c. 3 years.
The whole grid computing initiative, e.g. the Globus Project, is very much a large-scale way of utilising the enormous quantity of wasted resources within BigCos. It might just work.
DVD Easter Eggs . Marvellous.
Why Napster is Right Great rant about copyright, Napster etc. “We should be able to sell music we legally purchase.” That should be obvious, no?
“Adam Vandenberg had an aha moment thinking about Radio in relation to Microsoft Sharepoint. He’s right that everything we do is about presence. Our scaling strategy is Apache. (In other words static HTML and XML where ever possible, and using CPU cycles on the desktop.) Our model is publishing, even if it’s behind a firewall inside a corporation. We can’t fit our view of the world into Office apps. Neither can Microsoft, imho. Scott McNealy is a loser because he confronts Microsoft on the old battleground. There are so many ways to zig, why keep beating your head against the brick wall. I think MS and Sun must be in cahoots.”
We’ll be able to store all the Library of Congress on a laptop by 2008.
Update Office XP. How to get Office XP updated to SP1 correctly.
Corporate America Cashing In on Porn. Suddenly its a pr0n is big story, rather than an internet pr0n is big…
Quality Mark is a new directory of “reputable” tradesmen (read builders).
Interview: Forbes.com Gets Down to Business.
Forbes.com is separate to the magazine, and expects to stay ad-funded.
Customer retention is not enough.
McKinsey saying that the volume of change from customers changing their habits is far larger than the volume of customers defecting to other providers.
Brent Simmons explains MySQL in terms that make sense to Frontier users. Mark Paschal adds: “In doing so, he also explains Frontier (as a database environment) to MySQL users.” [Scripting News]
This Radio site is noteworthy because it’s the first to flow through Phillip Pearson’s Python clone of Radio Community Server. [Scripting News]
A Python clone means I could possibly run RCS on my own server, thus setting up weblogs for my family, etc.
Interview with Canter and Seigel, the orginal spammers.
Old Sierra Games Breathe Anew.
Good news - very pretty in their new incarnation, if a little /.ed right now.
Discussing the Nature of Reality, Between Buffets. Participants in the “Science and Ultimate Reality” symposium debated Really Big Questions about the nature of existence and consciousness. [New York Times: Science]
